If you’ve been watching the Azure Content repo on GitHub you probably noticed a ton of things pertaining to HDInsight being committed. Well, you guessed it, there are a lot of new additions when it comes to Azure HDInsight, specifically on Linux when to provide:
– Support for creating, deleting, listing, and submitting jobs to HDInsight clusters with Linux Operating System.

It would seem that the Visual Studio 2015 licensing SKUs are being announced now so as to provide organizations with a little time to ready themselves in terms of planning for software renewals and such with the new IDE coming out later this year.
According to the Visual Studio Blog posted on 31 March 2015, there will be a single offering called Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN that combines the Ultimate and Premium SKUs. This reduces the number of SKUs from 4 to 3 (Community, Professional and Enterprise).
For those that have a Premium SKU, it’ll get upgraded to Enterprise SKU. Apparently the cost of the Enterprise SKU will be less than that of the Ultimate SKU, but I’m guessing a tad more than the Premium SKU.
For more information check out the Visual Studio 2015 Product Offerings page.

This week has been a little hectic between work, life and community, but somehow Scott Hoag and I were still able to get together for an hour and record another session of Brewery.fm.

In this weeks episode, we call out Tim Ferro again – mostly because he asked us for some thoughts on an announcement from the Office 365 team on Azure ExpressRoute. Further, we discussed the intricacies of Azure’s RBAC features that were released a few months back (and how PowerShell is still the better way to implement RBAC if you need it with Azure) as well as a whole lot of other interesting topics.

One of the most overlooked tools of Office is OneNote. If you’re not using it, well, I’ve got questions for you, but I suppose if you’ve already made a large investment in something like EverNote, then I suppose it’s somewhat forgiven.

Microsoft introduced OneNote Clipper back in March of 2004 through their Office Blogs. It allowed the ability to “clip” a page from the web and push it to a OneNote notebook hosted up in Microsoft’s cloud. Pretty handy for students and professionals to capture information to organize and use at a later point.

Well, Microsoft released version 2 of the OneNote Clipper last week and I have to say that even as a Mac OS X user, it’s plain simple to use.

Each of the different browsers handles the installation slightly different. For example, within Chrome, the installation is completed as a Chrome extension where the user is prompted to install OneNote Clipper similar to other Chrome Extensions:

Once installed within Chrome it shows up similar to other extensions with a warm greeting to show you where it is within the extension bar:

After it’s installed, the UI of the Clipper in action is similar to what is seen in other browsers:

Alternatively, the installation for Safari on Mac OS X is slightly different.

Instead of characterizing Safari as a browser with a specific extension, OneNote Clipper gets treated as a bookmarklet.

Note that if you click on the Button to “Clip to OneNote” instead of dragging into the Bookmark bar of Safari, you’re greated with a cute message:
Don’t click, just drag 🙂

So you’ve dragged the “Clip to OneNote” up into the Safari Bookmark bar and then you’re confronted with the profound question… “Why haven’t I removed ESPN and Disney from the OOTB Bookmarks?”

Note that the OneNote Clipper in Safari is merely JavaScript in a Bookmarklet that provides operates a function called ‘oneNoteCaptureRootScript’. Pretty nifty in that the UI is identical to that of what is exposed within Chrome.

The actual functionality of the Clipper is pretty slick with the ability to capture a page, a region of a page or the text of a page as though it’s in an RSS Reader’s Article view. And while it captures these as pages that are images, Microsoft added an OCR capability within OneNote to dig through the images to find text (whoa).

Furthermore, the article view provides a nice capture of text as can be seen below, grabbing the core elements of the page without the CSS and such…

But there are some instances where the page doesn’t turn up any article elements, alerting the user to try a different mode:

All in all, a pretty slick implementation to assist in capturing relevant information to use at a later time. Well done Microsoft – even helping us Mac users out 🙂

If you’re excited about what’s next, definitely give it a whirl – be mindful though that per the article “the early build doesn’t contain all the features we’re planning to ship in the final product.” So what does that mean? More than likely Microsoft will be revving this over the next few weeks and months.